A Place so Foreign | Page 9

to look away from his stare.
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The first half of the day passed with incredible sloth, as I copied down problems to my
slate and pretended to puzzle over them before writing down the answer I'd known the
minute I saw the question.
At lunch I found a seat at the base of the big willow out front of the school and
unwrapped the waxed paper from the thick ham sandwich Mama had fixed me. I
munched it and conjugated Latin verbs in my head, trying to make the day pass. Oly and
the fellows were roughhousing in the yard, playing follow-the-leader with Amos
Gundersen out front, showing off by walking on his hands and then springing upright.
Amos' mother came from circus people in Russia, and all the kids in his family wanted to
be acrobats when they grew up.
I tried not to watch them.
I was engrossed in a caterpillar that was crawling up my pants-leg when Mr Adelson
cleared his throat behind me. I started, and the caterpillar tumbled to the ground, and then
Mr Adelson was squatting on his long haunches at my side.
"How are you liking your first day, James?" he asked, in his raspy voice.
"It's fine, sir."
"And the work? You're able to keep up with the class?"
"It's not a problem for me. We studied this when I was away."

"Are you bored? Do you need more of a challenge?"
"It's fine, sir." _Unless you want to assign me some large-prime factoring problems_.
"Right, then. Don't hesitate to call on me if things are moving too slowly or too quickly. I
mean that."
I snuck another look at him. He seemed sincere.
"Why aren't you playing with your chums?"
"I don't feel like it."
"You just wanted to think?"
"I guess so." Why wouldn't he just leave me alone?
"It's hard to come home, isn't it?"
I stared at my shoes. What did he know about it?
"I've been around the world, you know that? I sailed with a tramp steamer, the Slippery
Trick. I saw the naked savages of Polynesia, and the voodoo witches that the freed slaves
of the Caribbean worship, and the coolies pulling rickshaws in Peking. It was so hard to
come home to Frisco, after five years at sea."
To my surprise, he sat down next to me, in the dirt and roots at the base of the tree. "You
know, aboard the Trick, they called me Runnyguts -- I threw up every hour for my first
month. I was more reliable than the Watch! But they didn't mean anything by it. When
you live with a crew for years, you become a different person. We'd be out at sea, nothing
but water as far as the eye could see, and we'd be playing cards on-deck. We'd told each
other every joke we knew already, and every story about home, and we knew that deck of
cards so well, which one had salt-water stains on the back and which one turned up at
corner and which one had been torn, and we'd just scream at the sun, so bored! But then
we'd put in to port at some foreign city, and we'd come down the plank in our best clothes,
twenty men who knew each other better than brothers, hard and brown from months at
sea, and it felt like whatever happened in that strange port-of-call, we'd come out on top."
"And then I came back to the Frisco, and the Captain shook my hand and gave me a sack
of gold and saw me off, and I'd never felt so alone, and I'd never seen a place so foreign.
"I went back to my old haunts, the saloons where I'd gone for a beer after a day's work at
the docks, and the dance-halls, and the theatres, and I saw my old chums. That was hard,
James."
He stopped then. I found myself saying, "How was it hard, Mr Adelson?"
He looked surprised, like he'd forgotten that he was talking to me. "Well, James, it's like

this: when you're away that long, you get to invent yourself all over again. Of course,
everyone invents themselves as they grow up. Your chums there --" he gestured at the
boys, who were now trying, with varying success, to turn somersaults, dirtying their
school clothes "-- they're inventing themselves right now, whether they know it or not.
The smart one, the strong one, the brave one, the sad one. It's going on while we watch!
"But when you go away, nobody knows you, and you can be whoever you want. You can
shed your old skin and grow a new one. When we put out to sea, I was just a youngster,
eighteen years old and fresh from